When I wrote or rewrote the above articles, I tried to give a better picture of the players than I had the first time I tried to write these or similar articles. By now, I had a better library of books on Japanese baseball than when I did the articles before, so I could use them to improve my comments. I also used these books to update all of my articles through the end of the 2003 season, notably in the article on why we haven't had more Japanese players in the majors than we have.

I decided to use the power of the web to make these pages more useful than the previous static presentation I had used. A major aspect of this use of the power of the web was an index of my writings, called the InfoLinks. This required placement of anchors and links in the articles I had. While I was revising the HTML code to insert these items, it only made sense to clean up some of the things which didn't display neatly.

Along the way, our webmaster, Craig Tomarkin, inquired about ways we could make daily use of my material, and we came up with the idea of a feature we will begin today at the end of this entry, the Japanese Players (or Managers) of the Week. We'll tell you who the players or managers are and give a link to their places in the InfoLinks. The InfoLinks listing will then give you my pertinent writings about this individual.

The index includes not only the players I referred to in my articles, but everyone I found who scored at least 200 rtg2 points. That meant there were players listed in the index for whom I had written nothing about their NPB careers. I wrote a Miscellaneous Biographies article to cure that oversight.

My goal is to keep everything up to the previous season unless otherwise specified, which means that I hope to have everything up through the end of the 2004 season by Opening Day, 2005. However, this is "limited" to the HTML files and those spreadsheets (such as the standings) which do not duplicate what I have in HTML.

There's an awful lot of material here, and while I've tried to clean up my mistakes, I am human. I haven't got an editor or proofreader to pore over this stuff and clean it up, either. As a result, I have two requests in the event you spot an error, even a typo: 1) please forgive the error, but 2) don't forget it--drop me a line about it so I can straighten it out.

I hope you find these pages useful, and if you have read my stuff in the past, more useful than before.